Maria Bakalova on Becoming Ivana Trump, That Controversial ‘Apprentice’ Rape Scene and Donald Trump’s Cease-and-Desist Letter

The first time Maria Bakalova came to New York City, she had to flee.

She was in disguise, shooting a scene for 2020’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” that put her alone in a hotel room with Rudy Giuliani. The former mayor touched her midsection and reached down his pants — and then Sacha Baron Cohen burst into the room wearing a wig and lingerie. Giuliani called the police, and Bakalova and Baron Cohen sprinted down Broadway and escaped to Romania to finish the movie.

“We did the scene, and immediately after, police cars started chasing us,” Bakalova remembers. “I was scared I might end up in jail.”

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The second time she came to the city, in December 2021, she attended a screening of her A24 movie “Bodies Bodies Bodies” and brought COVID back with her to Los Angeles, where she lives — an unwelcome souvenir that forced her to miss Christmas with her family in Bulgaria.

The third time, a few months later, Bakalova visited New York for a meeting. Her purse, containing her passport and visa, was swiped from her chair at a restaurant. That prompted an eight-week ordeal to get a new visa. A few weeks later, her wallet was stolen.

“I thought I’d never put my foot back in New York at all, because it’s just not my place,” she laughs. “It’s cursed.”

Alas, Bakalova returned in August 2022 to meet with director Madeleine Sackler about a role in her film “O Horizon.” Forty-eight hours later, Bakalova was on set for the sci-fi dramedy — and days before that shoot wrapped, the actor was slipped the script for Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice.” The “karma” of the city, as Bakalova puts it, changed.

Today, as she considers jaywalking across 59th Street to lunch at a hotel two blocks from Trump Tower, she concedes, “I think I’m falling in love with New York.”

Bakalova is back for the premiere of “The Apprentice,” a look at Donald Trump’s rise as a young businessman in 1970s Manhattan. Bakalova plays his first wife, Ivana Trump, opposite Sebastian Stan as the former president and Jeremy Strong as his mentor, Roy Cohn.

Released Oct. 11, less than a month before the presidential election, “The Apprentice” is not the first time one of Bakalova’s roles has thrust her into the world of American politics. It’s not even her first movie about Trump to debut weeks before the polls open. In “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” Bakalova and Baron Cohen go undercover into the heart of MAGA-land, crashing Mike Pence’s CPAC speech, performing at a gun rights rally and, yes, surviving advances from Trump’s then-attorney.

But the 28-year-old Oscar nominee, who grew up a world away from America and started teaching herself English five years ago, doesn’t view either movie as “political” but rather explorations of a system.

“It’s such a bigger picture than just these people,” Bakalova says, now seated on a patio, stabbing at a burrata salad in between Juul hits. “It’s the empire itself. It’s the American dream, and the dark side of the American dream.”

As a child in the port city of Burgas, Bakalova was a competitive singer.

For kids in the Balkans who want to make it out of the Balkans, “you either focus on music or sports,” she says. As part of a youth vocal ensemble, Bakalova traveled to other countries and performed at festivals, earning medals and scholarships. After attending drama school and landing small parts in her early 20s, Bakalova booked “Borat” and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a Hollywood career.

Her journey has similarities with that of Ivana Trump, who was a competitive skier and model when she arrived in New York. She later held key roles in The Trump Organization, including running the Plaza Hotel.

“I have a lot of respect for her,” Bakalova says. “She was very smart and knew what she wanted to do. I feel like she is the moral center of this story, as I see it.”

Before she was offered “The Apprentice,” Bakalova fought to meet with Abbasi. Although Ivana is 27 at the start of the film and Bakalova was then 26, she feared that Abbasi would perceive her as too young for the role. “I was worried I might look too childish,” she says.

So, holing up in a Manhattan hotel room, she found old photos of Ivana and spent hours emulating her makeup and midcentury updo. So what if it was just a casual meeting? Bakalova was already auditioning.

“It’s so freaky,” she says, swiping through photos from September 2022. “It’s so embarrassing because it’s like, is this going to land well?” There, on her camera roll, is Ivana, Ivana, Ivana, then Bakalova, Bakalova, Bakalova, magically older than the woman sitting across from me, in a checkered pantsuit and New Balance sneakers, sunglasses perched on her head.

Bakalova landed the part. While she may have nailed the look in a day, it took six months to perfect Ivana’s Czech accent, which Bakalova says has flavors of Britain, New York, Germany and Eastern Europe. She worked on her R’s, L’s, B’s and V’s, lowering her voice to demonstrate: “Vut are you doing?”

Bakalova held on to the accent between takes, staying in character alongside Stan and Strong. Because of the improvisational nature of the set, the three actors also needed to thoroughly research their characters so they could easily spin off the page, ad-libbing insults and details about Trump’s business.

Bakalova hasn’t yet let go of the character. The most recent item on her Spotify is a playlist called “My Ivana,” which she created one week before “The Apprentice’s” Cannes premiere. Some songs are self-explanatory — “Money, Money, Money” by ABBA, “Greedy” by Tate McRae, “Supermodel” by Måneskin. Other highlights: Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling,” Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” and Britney Spears’ “Toxic.”

There’s also a song called “Me and the Devil.”

One scene in “The Apprentice” depicts Donald sexually assaulting Ivana. (Ivana claimed Donald raped her during their 1990 divorce proceedings; she walked back the allegation in 1993 and again in 2015.)

Bakalova rehearsed the scene with Stan, Abbasi, an intimacy coordinator and a stunt coordinator before rolling cameras on a closed set.

“To show the authenticity of something that ugly, something really taking place in someone’s life, is difficult,” Bakalova says. “It’s challenging to physically take off your clothes, but it’s even more challenging to open your soul and be naked emotionally.”

The rape scene galvanized Cannes, and controversy enveloped the film. A firecracker title like “The Apprentice,” with a buzzy cast and an acclaimed director, would typically get scooped up at the festival. But distributors refused to touch the movie — nobody wanted to make an enemy of someone who might once again become the most powerful person in the world.

Days after the world premiere, attorneys for Donald Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter in an effort to block the film’s sale and release in the U.S. (On Monday, after the film’s opening weekend, Trump took to Truth Social to slam “The Apprentice” as a “cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job.”)

“I don’t understand it,” Bakalova says of Trump’s legal threats. “America is great because we have the freedom of speech.”

Finally, in late August, Briarcliff Entertainment acquired “The Apprentice” — and, in a highly unusual move, launched a fundraising campaign to “keep the film in as many theaters for as long as possible.” With the movie reaching American audiences last weekend, Bakalova has been doing press with Stan and Strong, who are keen to dig into the political context of the movie. She prefers to let the work speak for itself.

She is, however, thinking about the future of her adopted country. After the Cannes premiere, Bakalova visited a psychic, a tradition that is deeply encoded in her heritage. (In the ’90s, she tells me, a Bulgarian political leader took the advice of psychics to dig a 230-foot hole in the ground in search of extraterrestrials.)

Bakalova just wanted to know how the world would shake out after a tumultuous political year, though she’s wary of disclosing the results. So I ask if her glimpse into the future gave her comfort.

Bakalova forces a smile: “Not sure.”